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Speaking at BarCamp KL

I gave a short 30-minute talk at BarCamp KL today. The title of the talk was “Open Source Hardware – non-Arduino”. My objective was to basically make people aware of Open Source Hardware and that we exist and it is not all about Open Source Software only. My secondary objective was to generate some interest in this area among the different people in Malaysia. I basically structured my talk and whipped together some slides in 5-minutes around the title – “Open Source Hardware”.

Hardware
First, I started by defining why Arduino is not Open Source Hardware. This falls squarely into the realm of embedded software programming. While you can work very closely with the hardware, you are still limited by the capabilities of the hardware. The actual layer that I talked about allows you to design the hardware itself. So, one is no longer limited by the hardware layer at all.

Hardware is further broken up into layers:

System – SystemC is the primary language used at this level to stitch up the software guys who code in low-level C/C++ and the hardware guys who talk a different language. It is mainly used for modeling rather than actual design.

RTL/Gate – Verilog and VHDL are the primary languages used at this level. This code can actually be translated directly into gates through a process called synthesis. This is the main area of work done by most digital designers.

Transistor – SPICE is the main language used. It allows you to model actual transistors by feeding in parameters such as gate length-width, source-drain sizes and dopant parameters. This is primarily the realm of analogue designers.

Source
Hardware design is similar to software work in a way. The flow is similar and the skill-set required is also similar. In software the general activities are: code, compile, debug and test. In hardware, the general activities are: code, synthesise, debug and test. The bulk of the difference is the process of translating code into hardware.

In software, the compilation takes the code and outputs a binary blob that contains the software bits. In hardware, the synthesis process takes the code and outputs a bunch of logic gates. These gates can then be mapped into real hardware implementations and plopped onto an electronic board.

Open
Of course, there are lots of open source hardware designs out there, mostly found on OpenCores.

I gave a guy the example of the Arduino. If you work with Open Source Hardware, you can actually build a super Arduino – take an open source AVR core and couple it with a ethernet core, a crypto core, a video core and then you’ve got a souped-up Arduino without the limitations. You have just opened up a whole new market.